Indonesian Pres. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at the UN. Credit: Agencia Brasil

By Alex Schlotzer

While post-Australia Day is really when the regional “political” year cycle begins in Australia, there has already been a great deal of regional debate and analysis. Adding to some helpful electoral analyses by Antony Green and Possum Pollytics, I’m going to add some more discussion devoted to the coming year’s political landscape – I couldn’t help myself.  The difference is that I’ll be doing a little more broader look at our region; focusing on some of the major players.

There are a range of issues and many nations that could be discussed. But I’ll focus on New Zealand, Fiji, Indonesia, East Timor, Malaysia, and Tuvalu. Instead of discussing particular issues I’ll undertake a general analysis of the political landscapes for each.  In the preceding post I lightly touched on some of the issues across the region and a few of the political leaderships involved.

So what are the political landscapes for New Zealand, Fiji, Indonesia, East Timor, Tuvalu and Malaysia?

There are some significant electoral events occurring across Australia in particular which will be covered in more detail as they arise. However, one only needs to look briefly to Fiji to give rise to thoughts of what’s in store politically for Fijians in 2010.  There will always be a range of speculation about New Zealand ( many in Australia assume incorrectly that New Zealand’s political landscape is reflective of Australia’s) with some of their own domestic issues forcing an interesting political landscape in 2010.

To kick things off I will start with the often neglected Malaysia (well in Australia at least)

Malaysia

Malaysia is a country which has seen a long and drawn out struggle to what is now some resemblance of a democratic nation much like its neighbours Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and East Timor (admittedly East Timor isn’t a direct neighbour but it’s in the hood).  This country experiences significant problems domestically with extremes in poverty and wealth.  There are seemingly an endless string of problems with labour and workers’ rights, as well as significant issues with deforestation and continued infringements on human rights.  What makes 2010 significant for Malaysia is that despite its apparent problems, the most significant of them being the domestic political turmoil, there appears to be progress towards better transparency.

However the problems for the incumbent leadership really are about domestic issues and how to keep their country from quickly sliding backwards after years of relatively steady economic growth – albeit underpinned by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. With growing extremist populism in politics taking root even in the moderate political parties, the country faces growing isolation as other countries’ attempt to work to resolve Western sentiment of the region being riddled with terrorism, extremist organisations and terrorist training camps.  There are many unresolved problems between different ethnic groups, especially involving Malaysian Chinese.

One cannot neglect the country’s own checkered political history from tyranny to democracy and it is here that Malaysia has its problems.  While the country apparently wants to move forward with a democratic republic, they seem unable to put into place the necessary democratic checks and balances.  And like Indonesia, the country continues to suffer significant problems with corruption, collusion and nepotism.

In many ways Malaysia and Indonesia share many of the same problems.  And they also have tense relations over everything from migrant workforces to culture emblems.

Indonesia

Indonesia remains one of the region’s most active political players.

There is much that can be said about this nation; there’s many positives and negatives. As I have already mentioned, Indonesia and Malaysia share many things in common. They have a joint history, pre-dating European invasion  and share many cultural, religious and moral values. Indeed the respective nations, as mentioned above, suffer from similar political problems including widespread corruption, collusion and nepotism. Indonesia’s president has won office on the back of his promises to tackle these particular issues, which is among the most cited reasons for Indonesia’s “problems”.

The country is significantly indebted to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and this is a telling aspect to the high prices of petrol. In a country where most of the population relies on kerosene and petrol for day-to-day existence and live on $2(US) a day, high petrol and kerosene prices is very bad news for every level of government and politician. There are also growing costs for staples like rice and water, let alone inadequate housing, health care and education. Indonesia continues to struggle with human rights issues in some provinces and on-going problems with labour rights.  On both these particular fronts, the country lacks the institutions to monitor and enforce the laws.  Unions have to continue to campaign to maintain basic rights and entitlements that people in countries like Australia take for granted.

Each natural disaster that rocks Indonesia is another distraction from SBY’s [President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono] agenda of reforming the country’s financial, political, legal and social institutions.

Added to this there are a multitude of provinces with a great diversity across the world’s largest archipelago. And there are a multitude of political parties, each with their own “strongholds”, with a number of parties at the national level. Indeed SBY relies on loose coalitions with other political parties, each seeking to have better ministries and more news coverage. There will be a range of provincial and regional elections that could make things more difficult for SBY to roll out reforms at the local level.

Because of these large number of political obstacles, SBY is hamstrung dealing with the national politicking and responding quickly to natural disasters and crises.  His trick will be to ensure that the necessities of life don’t become out of reach of more Indonesians; and damage his voter base. However, like Malaysia, Indonesia is somehow managing to progress, slowly but surely as some of SBY’s efforts to reform trickle through to the local level.

The political landscape in Indonesia will be quite interesting to watch as it plays out throughout the year.

East Timor

Though East Timor isn’t a major player in the region’s political landscape, it is well  worth mentioning (as are Fiji and Tuvalu below).  The country is gripped by extreme poverty with much of the nation’s infrastructure slowly being built, however like its neighbour and former coloniser, Indonesia, it too is plagued with regular accusations of corruption, collusion and nepotism.

Their fledgling republic continues to struggle with developing open and transparent governance structures.  They have few protections for workers or established the necessary structures to monitor human rights abuses. There are regular claims of abuse, intimidation and even violence against union officials, delegates and workers who are known union members.  There are also reports about regular abuses against women and children with a lack of social security, basic health care and education. The country is apparently unable to administer effective justice under their developing laws in many regions, especially the more remote ones.

East Timor also provides an interesting political dynamic as a nation, with a great deal of factionalism between the president and prime minister and the president and the prime minister and their former party colleagues, now in opposition.  The prime minister and president have swapped roles but remain at odds over many measures to procure security for the country as well as implement financial, social and justice measures.

Fiji & Tuvalu

Despite their small size, Fiji and Tuvalu were among some of the most touted names of the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.  They are not considered very big players in their own region and it might seem very unfair to discuss Fiji and Tuvalu under the same heading given they’re very different countries, but in many ways they have a shared struggle. Admittedly each will deal with this struggle in different ways.  However, they both face a rocky future if climate change is not tackled in a serious and global way.

For Fiji, the country remains at the whim of a dictator.  While the country manages to continue to attract tourists and investors, there will be little movement by the Bainamarama regime to re-instate the constitution and hold free and fair elections.  However, there is continuing pressure from New Zealand and Australia for Fiji to return to democracy.  Other nations in the immediate region, like Tuvalu and Samoa, are urging Fiji to re-instate the constitution as there are direct pressures applied to limit trade and diplomatic relations with Fiji. Whether Fiji can progress and move forward with improvements to their economic, social and environmental efforts to-date.

Tuvalu on the other hand seems to be relishing their new found international stardom.  They have been capitalising on this by encouraging people to visit their country before it disappears.  Politically the nation is relatively as stable as can be expected, however there remain significant domestic tensions among the ruling leadership.  This isn’t likely to result in a military coup but it could destabilise some of the social structures within local communities.

There are the usual problems with developing countries like Fiji and Tuvalu; lacking education, public health care and social security.  There are also issues with labour rights abuses as workers in each country find it difficult to have their basic rights upheld.  There are also reported human rights abuses.  For each country 2010 will be another year spent trying to build political capital within the region to tackle climate change, while attempting to maintain pressure on the global political community.  It could be a futile exercise and come undone with any changes in leaderships in either country from factional infighting.

New Zealand

As I mentioned in my piece about the regional political round up for 2009, and before that in my piece on New Zealand being a better regional sheriff than Australia, the nation can be reasonably pleased with its performance as a regional player.

New Zealand’s conservative government is still new enough to have not done major damage to its public profile, although some would say the uneasy union between the conservatives and the Maori Party is a major source of embarrassment for the conservatives.  However, the coalition are still not winning any friends despite their apparent efforts to repair the country’s rocky economy.  The NZ conservatives unfortunately derive their “expertise” from Australia’s Liberal Party, including their economic policies.  Some will argue that the new conservative government is repairing the many years damage caused by the former Labour government. Yet the conservatives are still implementing faulty policies to protect the big end of town; and they are effectively attempting to circumvent the real issues facing the country.

On an international scale they have many issues with fluctuating trade figures and difficulties in producing greater employment participation, which is to be expected being one of the most southerly inhabited places on the Earth.  They are far from everywhere except Australia and like Australia has a pretty similar political system and is stable politically.  However, unlike Australia they have greater representation of minor parties in the national parliament.  Here the Kiwis are different in that they have no state or regional governments, just local municipalities and the federal government. But the extent of minor party inclusion could also be the undoing of the new conservative government. The conservative government relies on a loose and uneasy coalition with the likes of the Maori Party. The Maori Party’s most outspoken Member of Parliament continues to be a major problem for the conservative government. With such media problems for the government it makes it harder to get on with governing and letting voters know about them.

Just recently the “rogue” MP was up to his usual modus operandi and is putting the conservative government in a difficult position.  It needs the coalition to hold in order to maintain government, and it needs to appear to be “mixing with the Indigenous people” to have some shred of credibility with the NZ equivalent of Australia’s “Doctors’ Wives”.

Of course we’d want to hear your angle about the political landscape for our region in 2010.

Alex Schlotzer is a straight talker when it comes to politics and loves to vent his spleen. Actively involved in Australian and international politics with a keen understanding of the dynamics of the political machine, Alex has a prolific online presence and has been a cyber activist for over 15 years. Regional editor of theangle.org, he can also be found at his blog and his exciting online project Australian Politics TV.

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Tags: Fiji, indonesia politics, malaysia politics, nepotism, new zealand politics, pacific corruption, pacific politics, tuvalu